Jimmy Carter urges Dems not to impeach Trump

Don’t count former President Jimmy Carter among the select number of Democrats vying for the impeachment of President Trump if they win the House during this November’s midterm elections.

“I don’t talk about impeachment,” he said on Tuesday during an interview with FOX Business’ Neil Cavuto. “I think that’s the wrong thing for Democrats to do.”

Calls from the left to pursue impeachment spiked when the president’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty last week to making illegal campaign contributions and said he’d been directed to do so by Trump. Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was also found guilty on eight counts of financial crimes, including tax fraud.

However, top House Democrats -- including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. -- have largely pushed back on calls to pursue that option, hoping to appeal to more moderate voters during the Nov. 6 midterms.

Trump himself warned against impeachment, saying that if he were ousted from the White House, it would likely cause the markets to crash and “everybody would be very poor.”

Most market experts tend to disagree with this theory, and so does Carter, who said the general attitude in the business community and policies implemented by the Federal Reserve have much more to do with the economy than the president or politics do.

“I think the president has much less influence over the economy than is certainly publicized by the president himself,” Carter said. “I know when I was in office, some bad things happened with the economy. I never did feel that I was responsible for it.”

Carter, who has been a former president for 37 years, longer than any other in American history, said the U.S. has been going through a “phase of difficulty” in terms of polarization. But, he said, the country has overcome disparities in the past.

“I don’t have any doubt that basic principles of America and the basic status we have of equality between people will prevail in the long term,” he said.